Elijah Zarwan writes in solidarity with detained blogger Moneim:
Abd al-Monim Mahmud, a young, articulate Egyptian television journalist and blogger with a taste for Martin Scorsese movies, sits in a dirty, overcrowded prison on the outskirts of Cairo. Security officers arrested him at Cairo airport last week as he tried to board a plane for Sudan, where he was to work on a television story about human rights abuses in the Arab world for the London-based Al-Hiwar satellite channel.
Egypt’s notorious State Security Investigations department has issued a preliminary report on its investigation into Mahmud and, according to one of his lawyers, cited his public criticisms of the government’s human rights record, and specifically its use of torture. The day after his arrest, a prosecutor interrogated Mahmud for almost a full day and charged him with “belonging to a banned organization,” with “being an administrator in a banned organization,” and funding an armed group.
Mahmud has made no secret of his affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. The organization, despite having renounced violence for decades and being the largest opposition bloc in Egypt’s parliament, remains banned in Egypt. But the reason authorities targeted Mahmud for arrest, out of the tens of thousands Brotherhood members, was his outspoken criticism of human rights abuses in Egypt and his broad contacts with foreign journalists and secular pro-democracy activists.
In addition to his journalistic work, Mahmud ran a blog in English and Arabic called “Ana Ikhwan,” (I am a Brother), in which he criticized human rights abuses in Egypt. He wrote about being tortured in 2003, and about the sentencing in February 2007 of Abd al-Karim Nabil Sulaiman, a secular government critic, to four years in prison for “incitement to hate Muslims” and “insulting the president.”
Mahmud also helped run the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language Web site and assisted families of Brotherhood detainees facing military trials to start blogs to campaign for their release. In the weeks before his arrest, he had spoken out about torture in Egypt at international conferences in Doha and Cairo and in interviews with journalists and human rights organizations.
It was Mahmoud’s willingness to speak out, not his membership, that got him into hot water with the authorities. Once again, the Egyptian government is prosecuting a journalist for reporting on human rights abuses when it should be focusing its energies on ending those abuses.
